Hi Nicolas,
Thanks for the insight on the team composition. I have a few questions or
answers below. Feel free to reach out directly if you prefer, my email is
stephane@beladaci.com. I think the discussion is very relevant to Flex but
it seems to annoy some people. Also for the record, I keep my sources
anonymous and since I am directly connected on LinkedIn and Facebook to
over 500 past and present Adobe employees up and down the hierarchy, it is
virtually impossible to track down my sources.
2/ That does not include all the IP they bought, including the IP for video
decoding, DRM, etc. which is where the Flash Player still shines.
Adobe
3/ Many of us don't know for sure, but outside estimates put about 30% of
the FP codebase as licensed or purchased IP.
4/ The FP team primarily consisted of a team in the old Macromedia office
in San Francisco.
5/ That inflated quite a bit in the late 2000's as they started including
some of the new video functions in MovieStar.
That does not include all the IP
> they bought, including the IP for video decoding, DRM, etc. which is where
> the Flash Player still shines. Many of us don't know for sure, but outside
> estimates put about 30% of the FP codebase as licensed or purchased IP.
>
The video codec that made Flash, and Quicktime before it, is the VP from
On2 which has been leading the industry since inception. VP2 licensed to
Apple made Quicktime de-facto standard for online video in the 90s, and VP6
licensed to Adobe made Flash de-facto standard for online video since early
2000s. On2 was bought by Google and the VP8 is now open source. On the DRM
side, I think Google is doing a pretty good job at making sure we end up
with an open source solution with the backup it takes to be viable. For the
remaining IP Adobe might have, such as some aspect of the rtmp streaming, I
have convincing argument and course of action to have them give it to The
Player project in their own interest.
The FP team primarily consisted of a team in the old Macromedia office in
> San Francisco. They would be assigned a bug or feature and work on it
> until it was delivered, like most other projects.
Based on my information from contacts close to the matter, the product
ownership of the Flash runtime was sent to India around the same time
Narayen took the CEO seat. India was in charge to run the show and telling
the rest of the world what to do. I was able to confirm that they held
product ownership from information on the Adobe India website, but I am
still to narrow down the exact period it covered. I was told, and
fact-checked that both Macromedia and Adobe had a significant presence in
India. When the two merge Adobe ended up one of the multinationals with the
largest India presence, and that is when we started to see shift of power
and slow but steady transfer of upper and management role to Indian
individuals. The second round of related information I got was right after
Thoughts on Flash in 2010, I was told that the runtimes team was
more evenly spread internationally. I also remember extensive amount of
complaint about some of the work executed in India, such as the
AdvancedDataGrid class.
a/ Do you have any comments on the above? I am particularly interested in
anything you would know for sure to be inaccurate.
b/ Specifically, do you know the timeframe during which Adobe India was
product owner of the Flash runtimes? That might take us back as far as the
acquisition by Adobe or even the late Macromedia era.
c/ Do you know of any processes, workflow or practices specific to the
development and engineering of the Flash runtimes? Anything that might have
made the work of the team outperform or underperform? I am trying to find
out if anything should be avoided, or specifically considered, based on
past history and performance.
> That inflated quite a bit in the
> late 2000's as they started including some of the new video functions in
> MovieStar.
>
Could you develop what is MovieStar?
On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 4:38 AM, Nicholas Kwiatkowski <nicholas@spoon.as>
wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 4:37 AM, Stephane Beladaci <
> adobeflexengineer@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > Meantime, do someone know
> >
> > 1/ how many developers were working on the Flash player at the peak of
> the
> > engineering team in term of size? In other words, what was the maximum
> > number of tech workers working on the Flash player runtime as any point
> in
> > time? All included (engineering, developer, QA ...).
> >
> >
> The Flash Player team consisted of at most a dozen developers + Q/A + PMs,
> etc. over the years. Mind you the Flash Player has been a project that has
> been on-going since the mid nineties. That does not include all the IP
> they bought, including the IP for video decoding, DRM, etc. which is where
> the Flash Player still shines. Many of us don't know for sure, but outside
> estimates put about 30% of the FP codebase as licensed or purchased IP.
>
>
> > 2/ How was the development effort divided and distributed?
> >
>
> The FP team primarily consisted of a team in the old Macromedia office in
> San Francisco. They would be assigned a bug or feature and work on it
> until it was delivered, like most other projects. Back in the early days
> there was the big notion to keep the compiled downloadable FP very small
> (remember, a majority of the installs were done by people on modems until
> the early 2000's). If I remember right, they quoted a download of no more
> than 1MB in order to install and run. That inflated quite a bit in the
> late 2000's as they started including some of the new video functions in
> MovieStar.
>